Short but useful tips and tricks, randomly added.

Why using a blocker is very important

In response to this ridiculously over-the-top pure propaganda piece, whose purpose is to manipulate people into compliance to the one specific business model ad-driven web sites chose for themselves.

Left: without a blocker: 124 domains (note that I had Flash plug-in disabled, it would have been worse if it had been enabled -- I wasn't ready to go that far to make my point).

Right: default-deny with whitelisting of site's own domains (bestofmedia.com, bestofmicro.com): 3 domains. Page appeared properly rendered.

The content of the picture below is not fabricated, it's really what was reported by uBlock.

As I often say, ads are only the small visible tip of the iceberg of the insidious privacy-invading data mining of people, without their fully informed consent.

TechCrunch: Firefox Will Soon Get Sponsored Suggested Tiles Based On Your Browsing History

When creating a new tab and clicking a tile, here is what is reported for the behind-the-scene scope:

09:36:36 xhr https://tiles.services.mozilla.com/v2/links/click
09:36:34 xhr https://tiles.services.mozilla.com/v2/links/view

So here is a dynamic filtering rule to foil this new Firefox data-mining behavior:

behind-the-scene tiles.services.mozilla.com * block

If you would rather not use dynamic filtering, the following custom static filter will also work:

||tiles.services.mozilla.com^$domain=behind-the-scene